Chinese ACG Streaming Platform Bilibili Heads for U.S. IPO
Reported by several sources at first, Bilibili Music features more than 10000 theme tracks from animation and gaming, and premium users are allowed to download 600 tracks every month.

Bilibili, one of the most popular streaming services among youngsters in China, filed its initial public offering to SEC last Saturday. According to the documents, Bilibili is raising 400 million US dollars, and will be listed at New York Stock Exchange under the stock code “BILI”. Morgan Stanley, BofA-ML and JPMorgan are hired to be underwrites of this trade.

Launched in 2009, Bilibili currently is the largest ACG platform in China. ACG, includes content like Animation, Comics and Gaming, is a sub-culture phenomenon which originates from Japan, became a sensation gradually amongst teenagers.

By the end of Q4 2017, the MAUs of Bilibili reached to 71.80million, the increasing was 45.3% year-over-year. As statistics ended in 2017, 81.7% users of Bilibili are so-called “Z-Generation”, a.k.a people who were born from year of 1990 to 2009. Besides, the documents also revealed that its users spent around 76.3 minutes every day averagely last year on its platform, 4.1 minutes more year-over-year.

On the revenue side, Bilibili recorded around 397 million US dollars last year, which was a 372% increasing year-over-year. By contrast, it only recorded around 20 million US dollars in 2015. Meanwhile, the net loss of Bilibili was surprisingly narrowed. In 2015, its net loss was about 57.40 million dollars, and that number went higher in 2016 by the increasing of 59% to 140 million dollars. But things got better in 2017. Revealed by the documents, the net loss reduced to only 28.20 million dollars.

On the other hand, mobile gaming was constantly contributing major revenue streams to its whole business, and even made it to 83.4% in 2017. Due to the late start, Internet live business and advertisement business still were playing small roles in the income part, and only took the percentages of 7.1% and 6.5% separately.

With 21.5% stake in Bilibili, the chairman and CEO Rui Chen is the biggest solo shareholder, and the founder and president Yi Xu comes as the second with 13.1%. Chinese Culture Group is the biggest institutional investor with 12.8% stake. Apart from the above, internet giant Tencent, IDG-Accel and Lenovo affiliated Legend Capital are also among its shareholders.

In addition to gaming and video streaming, Bilibili also launched music streaming service in January. Reported by several sources at first, Bilibili Music features more than 10000 theme tracks from animation and gaming, and premium users are allowed to download 600 tracks every month.

Despite its growth, Bilibili is obliged to deal with some policy risks under the pressure of Chinese government. Last July, the government ordered major streaming platforms to rectify their content by removing foreign series and movies which were related to “LGBTQ, nudity and other inappropriate stuff”.

The disclosure comes days after iQIYI filed its IPO plan, which now has more than 50 million paid users in China.

Bilibili didn’t reveal the pricing and the timing of its share to sell.